The Case for Eating Butter Just Got Stronger
A
new study found no link between eating butter and heart disease
It looks like butter
may, in fact, be back. The creamy condiment is a
“middle-of-the-road” food, nutritionally speaking—better than sugar, worse than olive oil—according to a
new report, which adds to a growing body of research showing that the low-fat-diet trend was misguided. The
new study analyzed nine papers that included more than 600,000 people and
concluded that consuming butter is not linked to a higher risk for heart
disease and might be slightly protective against type 2 diabetes. This goes
against the longstanding advice to avoid butter because it containssaturated
fat.
To be clear, the new study doesn’t say
butter is a health food, rather that “it doesn’t seem to be hugely harmful
or beneficial,” says study author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman
School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts in Boston. This is in line with
the new thinking from a growing number of nutrition scientists who say that
cutting back on fat, even the saturated kind, is doing more harm than good.
“In my mind, saturated fat is kind of
neutral overall,” Mozaffarian says. “Vegetable oils and fruits and
nuts are healthier than butter, but on the other hand, low-fat turkey meat or a
bagel or cornflakes or soda is worse for you than butter.”
In the study, published Tuesday in the
journal PLOS ONE, the researchers looked at people’s butter
consumption and their risk for chronic disease and found no link to heart
disease. In four of the nine studies, people who ate butter daily had a 4%
lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes. More research is needed to understand
why, but it may be due in part to the fact that dairy fat also contains
monounsaturated fats that can improve blood sugar and insulin sensitivity.
As
TIME reported in a 2014 cover story, fat had become “the most
vilified nutrient in the American diet” despite the scientific evidence showing
it didn’t harm health or cause weight gain in moderation. “Saturated fat was
considered dietary public health enemy number one,” says Dr. David Ludwig, a professor
of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health and author of Always
Hungry?. “For the last few years there’s been research and
commentary suggesting that this focus is misguided.” (Ludwig was not involved
in the most recent study.)
Indeed, research is mounting that
saturated fat is better for you than processed carbohydrates like sugar and
white bread, which have beenlinked to diabetes,
obesity and heart disease many times over. In April,
Mozaffarian published a separate study in the
journal Circulation that analyzed the blood of 3,333 adults
and found that people who had higher levels of three byproducts from full-fat
dairy had a 46% lower risk of getting diabetes than people with lower levels.
Other studies have also shown that full-fat
products like dairy can be useful in weight maintenance and
other health factors.
Mozaffarian and his co-authors on the
new paper hope that this research moves nutrition conversations away from the
health effects of specific nutrients, instead focusing on the actual foods
people eat. “We eat cheese, we eat butter, we eat yogurt, we eat milk, and
meat,” says Mozaffarian, as opposed to calcium, fat and protein. Plus, he
adds, just because a pad of butter and a pastrami sandwich both contain
saturated fat, it’s the food that matters most. “Processed meats may have
different effects on stroke and heart disease, not because of the saturated
fat, but because of sodium and the preservatives,” says Mozaffarian. “In the
end, just making decisions about a food based on one thing like saturated fat
is not useful.”
Getting people to follow that advice
may be a challenge. A July 2014 Gallup poll found
about twice as many Americans say they are actively avoiding fat compared to people
avoiding carbohydrates. But a movement toward understanding the benefits or
risks of foods rather than their singular nutrients may be worthwhile.
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